Category: Burningbird

Categories
Critters Documents Legal, Laws, and Regs

The Dollarhite Rabbitry FOIA Results

A few years back I came across an article about the Dollarhites in Missouri and their little bunny business. According to the article, the Dollarhites only started raising bunnies to teach their son responsibility. It was, at most, a small, casual business.

In 2011, the Dollarhites were outraged to receive a notice of violation from the USDA, with a fine of $90,643. There was a lot of huffing and puffing about government overreach in the article, but I had enough experience with the USDA APHIS to know there had to be more to the story than was being told. I decided to file a FOIA request for all documents related to the case.

The USDA informed me that the investigation was still ongoing and they couldn’t provide me most of the documentation. They did, however, provide me a few documents, one of which I had already discovered for myself: that the Wayback machine had archives of the Dollarhite bunny selling operation as far back as 2006, not 2008, as the Dollarhites claimed.

Eventually the Dollarhites got Missouri politicians, including Claire McCaskill, to intervene on their behalf—something I wish politicians would not do, because this just leads to inconsistent applications of the law (a law created by Congress, I want to note). Especially when a little research on McCaskill’s part would have demonstrated other interesting documents associated with the case:

  • Rather than a casual operation, the Dollarhites were selling bunnies to a petting zoo in Branson, as well as a pet store. In one year, they sold over 4000.
  • An early investigative report notes Dollarhite was aware of AWA licensing, and gave the investigator the impression he was going to continue breeding and selling pet rabbits without a license (doc)
  • An investigator noted Dollarhite’s seeming hostility to regulation, as well as her safety concerns (doc)
  • An internal USDA memo expressing concern about enforcement in the case, considering the circumstances, in this case, most likely the publicity and Congressional interference (doc)
  • Another frank, interesting look at the USDA’s view of discussions with Dollarhite’s attorney, who seemed to be less than aware of how the government operates (doc)
  • A disturbing note sent by Dollarhite to the USDA (doc)
  • A very disturbing note sent to the USDA with an implicit threat (doc)

Among all of the more colorful documents are investigative reports, documented proof, as well as several settlement offers extended to Dollarhite that would have let him off without a fine as long as he agreed to stop selling bunnies as pets without a license—something Dollarhite didn’t note as frequently as he noted that $90,000 fine.

When the Dollarhites settled with the USDA, the USDA was free to fulfill my FOIA request, and I’m listing the documents here for others to access.

As I said earlier: there’s always more to these stories than what you see on the surface. Thankfully, the FOIA allows us to discover the missing pieces.

I wrote three articles on the Dollarhites:

John Dollarhite and his $90,000 fine

The Dollarhite Saga

Dollarhites: A saga that should end

Access a listing of the Dollarhite FOIA documents, individually, or as one document.

Categories
Just Shelley

When UPS says “train derailment”

I received a notice from UPS on a package shipped from California. “Train derailment” was all it said.

So I have to backtrack to discover that a coal train derailed in Nevada on Sunday, damaging the tracks. The tracks weren’t fixed until Tuesday, which delayed all other trains using these same tracks. My package arrived in Kansas today, where it was most likely unloaded from one of the delayed trains. My package will probably be arriving Monday rather than Friday.

At least I now know my package isn’t one of many, strewed across some desolate wilderness somewhere amidst twisted and torn metal—most likely being pawed by bears or wooly men.

Categories
Just Shelley

Golden Girl going, going, going

Folks who have been reading my various publications over the years will know about Golden Girl.

Golden Girl, in her prime and brand new

Golden Girl is a 2002 Ford Focus I purchased when living in San Francisco a decade ago. She’s my first car, since I didn’t get a driver’s license until later in life. How much later in life is incidental to this story.

Golden Girl met the new neighbor on Saturday.

Golden Girl, a little worse for wear

The rear of the neighbor’s moving truck hit Golden Girl just right, half tearing off her bumper cover. No issue about who was at fault in the accident, since my car was parked, but his insurance (Geico) is playing the ‘still investigating’ card. I expect to get reimbursed for the damage…eventually.

This is the latest in a series of automotive challenges I’ve had with Golden Girl, and the time has come to say good-bye. For many years I used the bus, and it won’t kill me to use a bus, now. I’m in discussion with an animal welfare charity about donating the car. Even with the damage, the car is in good working order and would be relatively easy to fix. It should fetch a decent enough chunk of money.

I like the idea of Golden Girl’s final act (for me) to be helping critters.

Categories
Books JavaScript Technology

Finished tech review and the move to Node 0.8x

Just finished the final tech review of my Learning Node book. At 400 pages, it’s a big book. I must admit to being more than a little tired. Right now, I feel I could sleep for a week.

The big announcement in Node land is that unstable 0.7.x is being moved to stable 0.8.x next week. As a final act for my book, I put all the examples through a 0.7.10 tests. The results were better than I expected, not as good as I hoped.

I hit a couple of minor deprecation issues. For instance, path.exists has been deprecated in favor of fs.exists. I used the exit event with one child process application, and I needed to convert it to the new close event. This new event not only waits for the process to end, but all stdio pipes are closed.

Other modules ran into the same deprecation issues. Most of the testing modules in Chapter 14 won’t work with Node 0.8.x, but I think the changes to make them work will be minor.

Socket.IO didn’t work with 0.7.10 and the developers know it. I’m more than a little surprised at the reaction to people turning in issues related to the problem. Not to mention, closing the bugs without even attempting a fix. As I wrote in comments to the issues, today’s 0.7.x stable is about to become next week’s 0.8.x stable, and this bug is going to get very popular.

The db-mysql module also didn’t work with 0.7.10, and the highly popular jsdom module also had problems.

I noted the compatibility issues in the chapters, and provided alternative examples for those I could correct. That is the best I can do.

I’ve giv’n her all she’s got, Captain!

Categories
Books Writing

Changing course

Learning Node will be my last book for O’Reilly, at least for the foreseeable future.

Learning Node was a particularly exhausting book. Not only is there much to cover in one book, Node is a very dynamic technology. I like to think my coverage is both comprehensive and solid, but I guess we’ll see how the book does when it hits the streets.

In the next year, I’m going to enter the ranks of the self-published. I’m also focusing less on technology, and more on other areas of interest. What these areas are will become evident over the next several months.

My next book won’t be on technology, and I’m not sure that the one after will be on technology, either. I’m not saying Learning Node is my last book on technology, but I am most definitely taking a break from the tech book field. Most tech writers will understand when I write about the challenges in providing decent and accurate code examples for a new or changing technology, at the same time you’re trying to ensure that your grammar is correct, and your prose is clear and readable. Not only do you have to worry about your comma use in your text, you also have to worry about comma use in your code.

Just when you finally punch all the code, screen grabs, and text into a comprehensive whole, you’re then faced with an audience that’s just as likely to tell you it’s not interested in buying a book when they can find the material online, and for free.

I’m one of the lucky tech writers in that all but a couple of my books have earned out the advances, and provided relatively decent royalties. I’m not a bestselling author, but to earn out advances on 20 books isn’t bad in the tech field. At the same time, though, I’m not making it as a writer, and I have to try something new. That, or see if the local McDonald’s is hiring, because my days of tech contracting are over.

I plan on being as innovative as possible with my self-published works. For one, I don’t see any of the books being very large. Electronic publishing opens the doors for focused, shorter works, attractively priced. By attractively priced I mean that I don’t see any of my books priced at more than $5.00. In fact, I envision a Starbucks pricing model, with book prices comparable to prices you’d pay for a Starbucks coffee: smaller books will be equivalent to the price for a tall latte; larger, more complex works, closer to the price for a venti Caramel Macciato.

Lower prices and shorter works does not mean the books won’t be solid. My first self-published book is on a topic I’ve been researching for three years. But it’s a focused topic: too big for a Kindle Singles, and way too small for a more traditional book. It’s a topic that greatly interests me, and I think that’s the most important consideration.

Of course, I still have to worry about grammar and the damn commas, but at least I don’t have to worry about code.